Department of Performing Arts

The Georgetown Theater and Performance Studies Program integrates creative and critical inquiry, emphasizing artistic excellence, interdisciplinary learning, socially-engaged performance, and the spirit of collaboration. Now offering a dynamic major in Theater and Performance Studies, the Program features a nationally-recognized faculty, including a number of the field’s leading scholar/artists, and many of the region's leading professional theater practitioners. One of the country's only undergraduate programs in Theater and Performance Studies, the fast-growing program has rapidly attracted significant national attention for its distinctive curriculum, reflecting the political and international character of Georgetown, as well as for its commitment to social justice, and its high-quality, cutting-edge student production seasons. These offerings, which include many DC and World-Premieres, as well as classics, musicals, cutting-edge contemporary plays, adaptations, ensemble-devised work, innovative family-oriented programs, and professional partnership events, have drawn consistently sold-out houses and have made Georgetown's the only University Theater Program in the region consistently drawing attention from press outlets such as The Washington Post. The Theater and Performance Studies Program is distinctive for its focus on adapting, devising and developing new work, civic theater and community-based performance, political theater, international and crosscultural performance, playwriting, performance art, solo and multimedia performance, ensemble-created performance, physical theater, world theater history, and innovative approaches to design and technology, acting, directing, dramaturgy, technical theater, and more.

The Royden B. Davis, S.J. Performing Arts Center opened in November, 2005 as the only building in Georgetown history designed specifically for arts education. The Center is the academic home to the Theater and Performance Studies Program as well as to two state of the art theatre spaces – the 239-seat proscenium Gonda Theatre and the black box Devine Studio Theatre. The Davis Center provides classroom and production learning laboratories for hundreds of students at Georgetown every semester, including for first-rate student-produced theater from Black Theatre Ensemble, Mask & Bauble, and Nomadic Theatre, as well as a wide array of music and dance groups in the Department of Performing Arts. In addition, the Davis Center is a hub for interdisciplinary exchange on and off campus, as well as with the wider DC community, through our Festival of Interfaith Arts, summer festival productions, and partnerships with Arena Stage, Synetic Theater, Sojourn Theater, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, American Opera Theater, DC public schools, and many other artistic, scholarly, activist, social service, and cultural groups.

The Davis Center Season unfolds in intimate dialogue with the Program’s curricular offerings. In addition to mainstage productions in the Gonda and Devine Theaters, the Program sponsors numerous workshops, readings, master classes, symposia, and guest lectures, placing students from the entire Georgetown community in regular contact with leading professionals from the US and beyond. The current roster of teaching faculty features many of the leading scholars, directors, performers, designers, playwrights, dramaturgs, choreographers, critics, technicians, community-based and multimedia artists in the field, including Derek Goldman, Robbie Hayes, Mame Hunt, Susan Lynskey, Sarah Marshall, Jennifer Nelson, Natsu Onoda, Ted Parker, Tim Raphael, Michael Rohd, Maya Roth, Deb Sivigny, Irina and Paata Tsikuirishvili, and Karen Zacarias. In addition, the interdisciplinary reach of the Program is epitomized by the extensive group of Associated Faculty with whom students work, scholars who are housed in other Departments on campus but whose expertise intersects with and contributes to the richness and diversity of the Program's offerings.

A partial and rapidly-growing list of other theatrical luminaries who have had sustained contact with Georgetown students in the Davis Center includes: Theodore Bikel, Irina Brown, Dan Conway, Peter DiMuro, David Dower, Joe Dowling, Olympia Dukakis, Rick Foucheux, Ed Gero, Danny Hoch, David Henry Hwang, Moises Kaufman, Liz Lerman, Emily Mann, David Muse, Heather Raffo, Clint Ramos, Stephen Richard, Ari Roth, Christopher Sivertsen, Leigh Smiley, Molly Smith, Tony Taccone, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Charles Randolph Wright, and Mary Zimmerman.